Adult learning professionals are understood in the context of European Policy as key factor for the quality of adult education. In this paper a transnational European study programme, the European Master in Adult Education, is focussed on as an academic contribution to the professionalization of adult learning professionals: What core themes of European Adult Education can be identified? What didactic approaches are required for a transnational curriculum? How is the labour market taken into co…
The author presents first-hand and personal accounts of what popular education looks like in a classroom. Barbara Bee has had over 30 years teaching experience in adult education programs with poor and disadvantaged learners. She is regarded as one of the leading Australian practitioners in that time who drew inspiration from Paulo Freire. She describes how teaching in the 1970s and 1980s was so different to today. Back then teachers were encouraged to negotiate the curriculum with students. Bu…
This paper arguments that if competency assessment is to make any contribution as a potentially “liberating” curriculum strategy for struggles of community development and self-determination then it needs to contest the authoritarianism of the national qualification frameworks that have been established in Australia and New Zealand. This article critiques research and policy efforts, in particular for indigenous learners which seek to merely make authoritarian curriculum and assessment structur…
Through their employment in adult education, or as an additional means of learning alongside adult education, the media contribute towards the shedding of limitations of the place of learning and are themselves places of disengagement at the same time. The author, in a media-analytic perspective, outlines how communicators from the world of publishing are integrated into the didactic triangle and thus devaluate the pedagogical frame of the learning situation. At the same time new structures are…
Press and public relations work in continuing education is gaining importance through digitization and social media. Here the current guideline for strategic communication in public spaces provides a solid and systematic presentation of the basic structures of press and public relations work. The focus is on different communication strategies for large and small institutions, communication with adult and continuing education target groups, the classic tasks of press and public relations, the We…
This text is focused on examining the relevance of the trends towards democratisation in the Adult Education context of Spain. After giving a description of the legal frame, the text develops a brief explanation of the different models which coexist in Adult Education centres. In particular, the author emphasises the relevance of the social model in the Spanish contexts of Adult Education, as it is starting from high expectations about the learners’ capacities and based on the participant’s rig…
